And it's not fairly easy to discover what aspects of the human potential are usually identified as masculine and which ones aren't, — Moliere

It is for me.

There's the aspect of reducing masculinity to psychology, which I'd say is similar to the response to feminist criticism which puts their critique of gender in the personal, rather than the political or public, realm. Rather than concrete material conditions you're saying the psyche is an ancient power which re-manifests itself throughout all culture, something which is much greater than any material analysis or political project could hope to put a dent into. — Moliere

I see that I'm as opaque to you as you are to me.

Which may be true, but then the feminist critique is always bringing the psyche back to the material -- if it's truly a psychological power, rather than a material one, then we could very easily upend how families own and pass on property. It would be of no consequence. — Moliere

We did upend how families own and pass on property around the time women got the vote. Prior to the early 20th Century, an American woman couldn't own a business unless she was married. Women would get married for no other reason than to allow them to participate in business ventures. That's all changed. In fact, all the things that Mary Stanton lamented have now changed, and the new way is taken for granted. There is no conflict between recognizing masculinity as a component of the psyche and recognizing how those images play out in dollars and cents.

If it were easy to determine the masculine and the feminine then what's all the fuss about? Is gender-identity a numerology or astrology in your view? — Moliere

Every trans person on the planet knows exactly what counts as masculine. It starts with that recognition. I think you're maybe addressing something about non-binary people? I'm not sure.

This mental move is exactly what Kate Millet describes as the patriarchal move -- the mental is the explanatory intermediary between biological sign and social role in her description of the patriarchal relationship.

Also, I'm not so sure about a psyche developing over millennia. Masculine-Feminine distinctions are common across cultures, for certain, but their mode of expression isn't rigid. Even what counts as something worth evaluating under Masculine-Feminine changes. — Moliere

I'm coming up blank trying to discern your message. But if it's working for you, :up: :grin:

Nope. That's why I've been careful to say men and women can have the same characteristics, and a difference cannot be found in differentiating characteristics.

So far I've been of the mind that it's a manner of expression, rather than a set of characteristics, that makes a gender-identity. But, then, some gender-identities get tied to characteristics in their particular way, so while in general it's better to say gender-identity is a manner of expression, a particular gender-identity may very well fixate on particular characteristics and act to put those on display more often, or improve them, or some such. — Moliere

A manner of expression? I mean, masculinity as a kind of archetype has been around for thousands of years in multiple cultures. It's fairly easy to discover what aspects of the human potential are usually identified as masculine and which ones aren't. So maybe we're talking at cross purposes, or maybe just about entirely different subjects. This is not fundamentally about politics. It's about the heavy hitters in the human psyche as that psyche has developed over the millennia. Current politics is a sniff in a hurricane compared to that.

And while I don't think it's the traits or characteristics that make up a gender-identity, so that men and women can share characteristics, I'm not sure I'd go all the way and say women are the same -- some are the same, sure, and they are definitely sanctioned for not conforming to expectation in those cases, whatever that expectation happens to be in the particular cultural milieu. — Moliere

Are there characteristics we associate with masculinity (I'm talking gender identity here) that women never have? Like what?

Are we in a position at all to speak of a post-patriarchal masculinity, while the old family laws are still in place? — Moliere

We aren't in a post-patriarchal world, so probably not. I think it's important to distinguish between masculinity as the portion of the human potential we traditionally associate with males, and toxic masculinity which is the result of a pathological mindset, that is, the need to look down on someone else, or fear of women. The first is a fount of creativity. The second is something all need to be aware of.
When one decides that there is no difference between the two, that's misanthropy.

Masculinity isn't something males have a monopoly on. Women have the same characteristics, though they may be sanctioned for broadcasting it. That's why criticizing the way some males behave doesn't contribute much to understanding the animus.

This is just the axiom that things have already happened have necessarily happened in temporal logic. It doesn't entail that probability only exists subjectively. For that you also need eternalism, the claim that all events already exist at all times. Frequentism does not entail these though. There are plenty of ways to embrace frequentism and not rope yourself into determinism and eternalism. Otherwise, frequentism would have been much less popular in the face of observations that the universe behaves in a fundamentally stochastic manner.

So sure, probability is frequency is you take that definition as axiomatic, but I don't think there are good reasons to accept such a proposition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I guess actualism is just an interest of mine. We can put it to the side. The point is that talk of probability can reflect frequency. When it does, this does not represent information about the outcomes of unique events. In fact, all it really gives us is historical information.

It's true, we do have confidence in contiguity past to future, but Hume pointed out that this confidence can't be based on either empirical or logical evidence. This is the problem of induction. This inspired Kant to present the view that what we experience is conditioned by a priori knowledge. The idea is that we see and experience what we're wired to see and experience. This would explain why we're so sure about contiguity: it's coming from us in the first place.

Cause is there even if there is an attempt to banish it to the background. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As an essential element of the way we think, yes.

By the same token, if we looked up one night and saw "there is no God but Allah," written in Arabic in stars across the sky we wouldn't say "I guess some protostars brighten much more quickly than others and the existence of such stars is tied to the initial conditions of the universe, so there is nothing exceptional here." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Accepting that our powers of prediction and understanding are limited should leave us open-minded. Your touchstone is what you directly experience. If you saw a message written in English in the sky, you saw it. No question about that. Explanations should remain in flux. Was it a dream? Were you tripping? Is someone playing a joke? Is Allah talking to us? You go with what works best for you until some new information comes in and reorganizes your entire brain from top to bottom.

Anyhow, in your view is it possible to meaningfully talk about the probability that Biden wins the 2024 election? Does it make sense to say that aggressive anti-Chinese rhetoric by US politicians increases the probability of war? Or, as one time events, is it impossible to say anything about them because they are one time events? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd have to dissect what the speaker means in talking about the probability of unique events. I would look for signs that they're starting with a logical analysis, and weighting possibilities based on various factors.

For unique events, you can use probability based on logical analysis. You can't use frequency. You just can't. It makes no sense. You can't play out a unique event more than once.

One of the problems here is that populations can change. If the US passed a constitutional amendment that dictated that the winner of the national popular vote should become the next president, that would seem to make it more likely that the Democratic candidate would win in 2024 because, in the relevant population of recent election results, they have won the popular vote 7 of the last 8 times. But giving them just a 1/8 chance of losing the popular vote in the current climate, and given polling data, probably greatly overestimates their probability of winning the popular vote if Donald Trump is their nominee, as he lost the popular vote by large margins both times. So what then is the relevant population for frequency? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You can't use frequency for a unique event. Ever. It makes no sense.

Knowledge is about something, no? So it's necessarily tied to ontologically. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If it's knowledge about a unique event, it's knowledge of logical possiblity. This is just an assessment of which statements about the outcome are self-contradictory and which ones aren't. This is apriori knowledge. There is no empirical aspect to it. So yes, it's about something: it's about how we're bound to think.

Medicine does not say, "smoking doesn't cause cancer, bullets to the head don't cause brain damage, etc., all we can know is that previous samples of groups of people who have been shot in the head have a higher incidence of brain damage — Count Timothy von Icarus

When we say that bullet to the head has the potential to cause brain damage, this reflects experience with brains and gun shot wounds. It's fully possible for a person to receive a GSW to the head and suffer no brain damage. It happens all the time, especially in suicide attempts where they just end up blowing their faces off. Again, you have to take it case by case.

There are all sorts of ways to explore cause, do-calculus and the like, which are employed heavily in medicine. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Medicine is heavily and pervasively empirical. Most medical decisions are not research based. We do what works. We take ideas about causation with a grains of salt because the real world has so many variables.

If you don't believe in propensities, then you have absolutely no grounds for making classes whose frequencies you compare. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you explain what you mean by "propensities" here? It seems like you're trying to smudge the different kinds of probability together with folk expectations of the kind that drive gamblers?

I do believe in propensities. I just don't believe it tells me anything about unique cases. It tells me something about populations. So if you've been drinking a milkshake everyday at 2pm for the last 27 years, that tells me nothing about what you're going to do today. I won't be surprised if you drink a milkshake at 2pm, but I don't know ahead of time whether you will or not.

. If I flip a coin and it comes up heads 100 times in a row, and I don't believe in propensities, then I should just say that the probability of a coin coming up heads has changed, rather than positing that the coin is rigged. Indeed, what grounds would I have for saying the class of rigged coins and the class of coins are — Count Timothy von Icarus

Say you have a balanced coin. You have to face the fact that it's possible to flip it an octillion times and see it come up heads every time. That doesn't mean it's not balanced, and it tells you nothing about what it's going to do on the next flip.

Frequentism has problems with all one-off events. What was the probability of Donald Trump winning the election in June 2016? If probability is frequency then it was already 100%. But then what is the chance that Joe Biden wins in 2024? Does it not exist? Do probabilities only exist for one-off events after the event? Or are we forced to posit eternalism, that all events exist eternally, so that there is some frequency for one-off events we can reference? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly. Frequentism is what underlies actualism, a form of determinism.

Imagine that you're rolling a die at a craps table. You'll say that the 5 has a 1/6 chance of appearing face up. This is an assessment of logical possibility. We have to be careful about what we say after the die has landed. If it was a 5, we know it's possible that the 5 could appear face-up because it did! But could the 2 also appear face up? Logically, you can't have more than one side of the die face up. If the 5 appeared, it isn't possible for any other number to be face-up. So what happened to the other possibilities? Where did they go? What exactly are those other possibilities?

One way to look at it is to say those other possibilities are information we possess about how the universe works. We use that information to make predictions. But we can back off of imagining that those other possibilities have some ontological implications. They don't. They're just the result of our analysis.

But in that case, frequency is just a useful way to observe propensities and discover them, in which case it is absolutely fine to apply probability to one off events. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Woe. I don't think so. This is the fatal mistake people commonly make about statistics. Statistics allows you to make predictions about populations, not individuals. For instance, people who smoke have a higher incidence of COPD. So I can say if a person smokes, they're more likely to get COPD. However, among smokers, only about 10% will actually get it. As a pulmonologists told me once, most people who smoke "get away with it." So all you can tell an individual smoker is that they're in a category that has a higher incidence of COPD. I can't tell an individual anything about their medical future.

How does this not apply to all natural phenomena? Every event we observe only occurs at one time, in one place, in one way. I don't see how it doesn't generalize. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It does generalize.

But if you buy that, I don't see how it doesn't generalize to all arguments from statistical ensembles, making the entire scientific enterprise invalid. Every paper using statistics, every significance test, is bunk, because there aren't actually possibilities of different outcomes, but actually just the one outcome that exists. After all, the only set of observations are just those we do make. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's the misinterpretation that's bunk. You have to remember that probability is about knowledge, not ontology.

Yes, because there is a connection. Take the normal argument for Fine Tuning. If the constants of our universe and its initial entropy are such that the odds of their occuring are significantly less than 1 in 10×10^123, then it doesn't make sense to assume such things have occured by chance. You don't bet against a coin that has come up heads for 5 hours of flips because it is obvious that the coin isn't fair given the result. Hence, the Fine Tuning Argument has been taken seriously to date. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think probability can be taken one of two ways: it's either an assessment of some number of iterations (so we toss the coin 100 times, it comes up heads once, so we say it has a 1% chance of coming up. This assessment has to be considered in the light of the data from which it came.

The other way to assess probability is to examine the logical possibilities. Look at the coin and determine how it's weighted. If it's evenly weighted, there's logically a 50% chance it will come up heads.

If we've done an assessment of logical possibility and determined that of all the ways the universe could appear, the chances of it appearing as it is are 1 in 10^10^123, that doesn't really tell us anything about how this one possibility manifested, whether there was divine intervention or not. It just means we can imagine a huge number of other ways the universe could have been. Logical possibility is about our imaginations and logical dictates.

Unless you can prove the necessity of the laws, under determination makes it more likely that you're actually in a universe that lacks such laws, and that this will be revealed at any moment as order breaks down. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see what you're saying, but I don't think it works that way. The universe either has a pending breakdown in order, or it doesn't. An assessment of logical possibility won't help us determine which universe we're in. We can't use the iterative form of probability either, because by definition, the universe is a one-off. However it is, it had a 100% chance of happening that way because the assessement is 1/1.

The multiverse does not solve this problem at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree. What's true of our universe is true of a multiverse. Each individual universe had a 100% chance of being the way it is.

The only way to diffuse the Boltzmann Brain problem, or the related question of "why the universe should be rational," is to find out why the universes' incredibly unlikely traits should be necessary — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem to be drawing probability (with the word 'unlikely") and possibility ("necessary") into it.

There are some good arguments for determinism, more along the lines of actualism than causality. Would that solve the problem?

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible". --Einstein

It's true. William the Conqueror died as a result of an injury to his groin caused by the horn on his saddle as he was proceeding out to squash someone. He should have allowed a peaceful transfer of power.

Hell, at this point it would be an improvement to have a republican president commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and then honour that commitment. — flannel jesus

Peaceful transfers are for losers.

But -- but -- isn't it true that there are true statements?!"

It can be hard to convince yourself -- hard even to see the possibility -- that the answer to that question does not matter. — Srap Tasmaner

Because truth and an affirmation of realism are so basic to speech, thought, and action, even if you're in a dream.

I think for some, the emphasis on true statements is about smuggling in correspondence theory. If there are true statements, and truth is correspondence, then there must be a real world for our true statements to correspond to (even if it's a hologram.)

A realist doesn't need correspondence, though. I could adopt Davidson's approach to truth (if I could remember how it works) and just add realism on as an appendage. I wouldn't have an argument, though. Just sentiment.

It's why Isaac -- though he considers himself a kind of realist -- considers words like "real" and "true" useful mainly for bullying your opponents. — Srap Tasmaner

:lol:

According to Rouse’s reading of Witt, “No rule can specify its correct application to future instances. — Joshs

Witt or Quine? Quine is famous for demonstrating that the ability to apply a rule in new circumstances has to be innate. You can't learn it.

Since the beginning of this, I'm more confused about what's going on over there. Is this going to be like a hundred years war where eventually nobody remembers how it started?

Are you asking if we can dispense with morality? I think we do when we look at ourselves naturalistically, anthropologically.
— frank

No, it was a provocation about the relativistic dimensions of postmodern thinking. But your point is interesting. — Tom Storm

Relativism appears to be built into thought itself, as we mentioned earlier wrt science.

Anyway, the question at hand is, do we ever arrive at an approach where genocide can't be seen as different to charity? — Tom Storm

Are you asking if we can dispense with morality? I think we do when we look at ourselves naturalistically, anthropologically.

It simply allows us to enrich such concepts by revealing a basis for them that they are not explicitly aware of. — Joshs

That would require a transcendent vantage point which is unavailable. There's no basis for perception being revealed, but just a parade of myths, metaphors, and speculations, which is fine. It's just not ontology.

In other words, by dropping the focus on truth as correct match between subject and world in favor of truth as the invariant features of our constructions of experience, we enrich concepts like material reality with the dimensions of self-reflexivity and interactive reciprocity. — Joshs

We should have long since dropped "truth as a correct match between subject and world." That's correspondence theory. It has a infinite regress at its sprouting point. If you're looking for something rigorous, look into the ways logician's have demolished correspondence as the measure of truth, and the same rigor would do away with any other theory, including that truth is the invariant features of our constructions of experience.

This is what I'm saying, you've arrived at the crossroads of AP and continental philosophy. What do you do next?

It’s a phenomenological analysis based on what actually appears to me — Joshs

Sure. And that kind of data can be interpreted in a thousand different ways. There's no way to determine which is correct. It's fun to work on philosophical projects, but that fun is as far as it goes.

From a naive vantage, I see empirical objects existing in the same world as others,but from a more rigorous vantage, after having bracketed what is contingent and relative in my experience of the world, what remains for me are synthesizing processes that correlate never-repeating elements of experience based on patterns of perceived similarities. — Joshs

And that doesn't get you to a transcendent vantage point. When phenomenology pretends to become ontology, it's language on holiday.

I find
Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the construction of empirical objects helpful here. According to Husserl, in my perceptual experience of the world, my empathetic connection with an intersubjective community in the form of apperception of alter egos leads to an ‘objective’ social space in which each individual believes himself to be living in the same world, in which his own perceptions are mere appearances of the identical things that everyone else experiences. But this sense of my own perception as mere appearance of what is factually the same for everyone is the appearance for me of what can never be actually identical. The ways in which I apperceptively fuse others perceptual contributions to the constitution of objects with my own perceptual adumbrations will always provide me with constituted appearances of things which are unique to my own construing, even as I calls these personally construed appearances a mere representation of the true world, identical for everyone. — Joshs

But this doesn't go beyond the realm of speculation. Notice that you're giving an account of the nature of reality, but you don't have the transcendent vantage point implied by the narrative.

Antirealists point out that for "The kettle is boiling" to be true, we need "The", "kettle", "is" and "boiling". And seem to stop there.

But we also need a boiling kettle. — Banno

Nah. A deflationary account of truth is compatible with either realism or anti-realism.

democracy is a bad system when most of the population is insane. — unenlightened

I don't let my diagnosis define me.

therefore there are no truths. — Banno

They've just been deflated till they're flat as pancakes.

Something bigger than any individual is very wrong.
2h — unenlightened

But imagine that you're one of of Trump's
supporters. You really believe Trump has been unfairly targeted by authorities to keep him from fulfilling his Godly mission.

From a certain point of view, it's just a big movie screen we're projecting our myths upon, as we've done generation after generation. An epic saga is partly history, partly religion, partly a justification of the power structure, and partly entertainment.

You just have to allow yourself to be enchanted.

Give me your number. I can call you and you can confirm whether I’m awake or dreaming. — NOS4A2

We're aiming for the philosophical 17th Century. Somehow we keep missing it. :blush:

I have no proof that you just posted that. But evidently you did. — unenlightened

One assumes someone posted it. Maybe it was Floyd.

I’m awake. — NOS4A2

All you can do is assert it. You have no proof.

There is plenty of evidence. It’s just that some people refuse to believe their lying eyes. — NOS4A2

You're dreaming. Prove me wrong.

As soon as we come to believe both are of the same reality we have no choice but to speak of reality. — NOS4A2

Sure. There's just no way to prove they're "of the same reality.". People just do it without any evidence or sturdy reasoning. That is worth pondering.

Lawson holds that, Wittgenstein abandoned metaphysics as a direct consequence of his having concluded in the Tractatus that a realist theory of language was not possible because it falls to the self-referential paradox that it is unable to give an account of itself.

Is this problem insurmountable or overstated? — Tom Storm

I think it's insurmountable. What you can do is methodological metaphysics.

I understand in individual cases actual democracy can be inconvenient but the degree to which it is so is directly proportional to your inability to believe in it. — Baden

Sometimes democracy just doesn't work for the people. Democracy isn't an inherent good. It lasts as long as it provides minimal stability. Once things actually start breaking down, dictatorship is likely the next step since that's the only kind of government that can act swiftly and effectively to re-establish stability.

You have to boil it twice. It tastes like spinach.

Affirmative action was an attempt to force fairness by doing something that wasn't fair. Did it do more good than harm? I don't know if there's any way to quantify.

Probably unsurprising, but I'm going to say that all bodies are not disgusting. Bodies are an abstraction from the concrete perception of another individual. In the present you see a form, and that's all you can say theoretically. Your disgust is only yours, and not a society-wide disgust. I can honestly say I don't care (EDIT: in terms of disgust -- obviously I have sexual desires) about seeing naked bodies in the least regardless of their form.

The only condition I can think of in which some bodies are disgusting is that if I desire all bodies to be attractive to me, sexual or otherwise. But that's clearly a groundless desire, given how our notions of aesthetics are different from one another. — Moliere

I don't think you've over-thought this at all. Just the right amount. :up:

Yup. As a retired scientist, I know that at bottom science rests on an axiom: the outside world is knowable. — Torus34

That's a good way to put it. :up:

Science starts with assumptions rooted in worldview, so any scientific assertion is conditional. Same for most statements that are held to be known.

That brings into question whether we can truly know anything at all. — Torus34

Cogito ergo sum.

Do not worry my friend, I carry it very lightly. I have chosen much heavier metaphysical and existential loads for myself which dwarf the notion of "humanity" into absolute insignificance. — Merkwurdichliebe

Wow! What are they?